ICANN, National Registrars Still Feuding

Damalloch writes: "The BBC website has this story about the EU's concern over ICANN's refusal to make guarantees about root server stability. Domain name registrars such as Nominet are threatening to withhold payment of ICAAN's fees unless something is done to reassure them. So far ICAAN has remained stubborn because of the huge lawsuit potential if a root server were to go down but with the possibility of having their income reduced, they might just be convinced to do something."

Comments

Some issues

[Zeinfeld]

The point that folk seem to miss is that the root name server IP addresses are hard coded into the infrastructure. To change the root servers you have to either wait for everyone to redeploy BIND or get an address reassigned somehow. There is a hard limit of 13 servers that is set by the length of an ethernet packet, the size of the records and the need to guarantee that the packets don't fragment.

Reassigning a root server address is hard because the operator likely has other machines in the address block whose numbers would also have to change.

The EU concern is not irrational, it is pretty wierd that the root zone is essentially a volunteer effort given that the costs are not negligible and the responsibility immense.

Against this however there is a major political issue at stake. The root operators are in effect the arbiters of the DNS. If ICANN gets too big for its boots they are a check on it.

The other issue is that there are very few companies that could credibly manage the root zone on a contractual basis. It is one thing to run a server on a volunteer basis, quite another to provide a service guarantee.

One thing that is in the pipe that may well change some of the concerns, in particular anycast addressing which allows multiple servers to sit on the same IP address. The packets are routed to the 'nearest' machine. That will allow the deploment of additional root servers. It will also address some of the denial of service concerns.